Privacy features are one main concern of every popular social media platform today. WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption is the most advertised feature even though WhatsApp isn’t the first to employ that feature. Signal is one of the social media platforms that is trusted by users because of its privacy features. Now the platform is taking another step to ensure its users that users will have overall control over their messages with some features added to the disappearing messages settings.
The feature of disappearing messages also called ephemeral messages or self-destructing messages was initially popularized by Snapchat. Signal had been using that feature since 2016. But it had to be enabled on each conversation separately in Signal, unlike Snapchat. This need for separately allowing disappearing messages in each conversation is finally going to be removed. Now with the help of a single switch, it can be set as a default feature. But it will be available in new conversations and groups which were made after the change.
The app is also allowing users to set the time limit for messages to be deleted from the chat history. There are no restrictions with predefined options, users can set it to any time frame that they wanted. It can be a few seconds or a few weeks as desired by the user.
It is interesting to note that Signal is advertising this as a feature to save storage space on the user’s device rather than a privacy feature. It surely has the advantage of a privacy feature but Signal doesn’t recommend using this feature while having a conversation with strangers or opponents.
